Re: Licenses for non-software entities
> > starters. What about the GPL etc? By all rights the GPL itself should
> > be in the verbatim section.
>
> The GPL has a built-in copying clause:
>
> Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA
>
> Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
> of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
>
> so we don't have a choice. I wonder if I've violated this license by
> copying part of the document rather than the whole for inclusion here? :)
By my interpretation of the arguments of RMS on the matter, no, you
didn't violate the license.
The license above doesn't cover the license above. What it covers is
the GPL itself. The above isn't part of the GPL, but is rather the
license of the GPL. In particular, RMS seems to feel that the legal
text of licenses isn't really covered by conventional copyright law.
They are legal permissions granted by one party to another. As such,
it would be permissible to copy and distribute modified versions of the
legal text of the GPL (which I will call the GPL', for convenience
sake), as long as you don't then claim that GPLed programs are covered
under GPL', since you don't have the right to change the license terms
of someone elses work.
The licence above really covers the non-technical material that is part
of the GPL (the introduction, the rationale, etc), which the FSF does
-not- want changed, since it is a statement of their position.
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--
Buddha Buck bmbuck@acsu.buffalo.edu
"Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our
liberty depends upon the chaos and cacaphony of the unfettered speech
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